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Phillips Tier 2 Language Intervention

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Early Childhood Syntax and Theory of Mind: Intervention Development and

Implementation

Beth M. PhillipsFlorida State University

Florida Center for Reading ResearchSeptember 21, 2012

LANGUAGE IN MOTION

SYNTAX & LISTENING COMPREHENSION

SUPPLEMENTAL INTERVENTIONDevelopment Team:

Beth Phillips, Karli Willis, Jennifer Ebener Melanie Fitzpatrick, Kelly Shepherd, Felesa

Oliver and others

OVERVIEW

• Language Primer

• Developmental Processes

• External influences

• Instructional Goals

• Design Studies

• Efficacy Trial

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Where does language come from?• Most children acquire language at a rapid

rate without much direct teaching of language. So, how do they learn it?

• Children need to hear language to acquire language.

• Children need to use language to grow their language skills.


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Where does language come from?

• Two basic natural processes:• Fast-mapping (receptive focus)• Incidental teaching (expressive focus)

• Instruction (vocabulary and syntax focus)

• To understand the developmental process and how we might frame instructional goals, we need to learn a bit more about what we mean by ‘language’

DEFINING THE COMPONENTS OF ORAL LANGUAGE

• Linguists typically divide oral language into five categories:

• Phonology• Semantics• Morphology• Syntax• Pragmatics


• Semantics: Understanding the meaning of words (vocabulary, synonyms, definitions).

• Morphology: Understanding the different variations of words (e.g., suffixes, affixes).• A morpheme is the minimal meaningful unit of a language.

• Syntax: Putting words together to form larger meaning units (e.g., grammar).• Use of increasingly complex (longer) phrases and use of correct

morphosyntax (e.g., plurals, past tense)

• Hierarchical in development (later developing components made possible by earlier components)

SEMANTIC ACQUISITION

• Around 18 months, language changes in two ways:• (a) Vocabulary growth increases. A typical child begins to learn words

at a very fast rate and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence; and

• (b) primitive syntax begins, with two-word strings.

• Preschool is a time of rapid vocabulary development.

• A typical 2-1/2-year-old knows ~450 words• A typical 3-year-old knows >1,000 words• A typical 5-year-old knows > 5,000 words

• On average, school-age children add 2,000–4,000 words a year to their vocabularies.


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COMPREHENSION & PRODUCTION OF SYNTAX

• Both production and comprehension follow a developmental sequence of increased complexity

• Just like with vocabulary, receptive comprehension of syntax in speech begins earlier and is usuallystronger than productive capacity


• Not all children receive the same high quality and quantity of language and vocabulary input

• This means children are often very unequal in their language development even by 2 years old (over and above the naturally occurring individual differences in approximate acquisition timelines)

INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS BEGIN EARLY

• Children have differing types of initial words• Referential focus on object labels• Expressive focus on interactions

• Sources of variability: internal• Gender• Memory skill• General cognitive ability

• Sources of variability: external• Frequency of input received• Timing of input received• Type of input received: complexity, expansions, specificity


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DEVELOPMENTAL CONSEQUENCES

Birth Preschool Kindergarten Elementary Middle School High School

Closing the GapHigh Achieving Children

Low Achieving Children

FUTURE RISK

• Early vocabulary and language skill is related to future reading and reading comprehension

• Early language limitations can impede further language growth

• Also related to overall academic success, including high school graduation and beyond

FUTURE RISK

How Does Preschool Oral Language Skill Connect with Later Literacy Skills?...

A Model of the Role of Oral Language in the Development of Reading

INDIRECT ROLE of Oral Language in Reading

OralLanguage

Letter Knowledge

DecodingReading

ComprehensionPhonologicalAwareness


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DIRECT ROLE of Oral Language in Reading

OralLanguage

Letter Knowledge

DecodingReading

ComprehensionPhonologicalAwareness

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION CONSEQUENCES

• Likely need to be more instructionally proactive to try to accelerate high risk children’s growth and try to catch them up

• May require more intentional and explicit methods than would typically need to use

• But, the earlier the better because the gap may be at its narrowest point

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

• Children from at-risk backgrounds are already months or years behind average language and vocabulary levels

• Want to fill in the holes, and

• Want to try to teach generalizable content and skills that children can apply in many oral and written language contexts


• Semantics: Understanding the meaning of words (vocabulary, synonyms, definitions).

• Morphology: Understanding the different variations of words (e.g., suffixes, affixes).A morpheme is the minimal meaningful unit of a language.

• Syntax: Putting words together to form larger meaning units (e.g., grammar)

• Use of increasingly complex (longer) phrases and sentences

• use of correct morphosyntax (e.g., plurals, past tense)


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EXAMPLES OF PRE-K SYNTAX GOALS FROM STATE STANDARDS

• Uses age-appropriate grammar in conversations and increasingly complex phrases and sentences.

• Child typically uses complete sentences of four or more words, usually with subject, verb, and object order.

• Connects phrases and sentences to build ideas

• Child uses sentences with more than one phrase.

• Child combines more than one idea using complex sentences.

• Child combines sentences that give lots of detail, stick to the topic, and clearly communicate intended meaning.

INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS

• Sentence level syntactical features can be roadblocks to listening and reading comprehension, yet

• Few prior interventions – outside of special education/speech/language clinical work –have focused on these specific syntactical and semantic targets

CHALLENGES IN SPEECH & PRINT

• “in-between” words that can create potholes in understanding• Conjunctions: Would you like cake or ice cream?• Prepositions: The dog hid his bone beneath the tree• Adverbs: Malik slowly stretched his arms • Negation: Do not run into the street• Elaborated phrases: Molly wanted ride the big, twisty roller

coaster• Combinations of these: I want ice cream but not with

sprinkles • Complex phrases: Josh reached down for the shaggy dog,

whose ears perked up again suddenly as he began to bark


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LATER COMPREHENSION & WRITING CHALLENGES

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTIONDEVELOPI NG A NEW T I ER 2 PROGRA M

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

• Goal was to focus intervention on sentence level syntactical targets in both:

• receptive (behavioral response and listening comprehension)

And…..

• expressive (productive authentic utterances)

Reading Comprehension

“Core” SyntaxLiterate Language

Semantic/Syntactical

Listening Comprehension

“Core” Semantics


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• Additional focus on mental state vocabulary and complex complement sentence structure, as linked syntactic-semantic targets that are related to comprehension of academic language

I think that it is raining outside

I know that candy is sweet


• 12 weeks of intervention

• 20 minutes per day for 4 days a week, pull-out instruction in small groups of 4 children

• Total of 16 hours of instruction

INSTRUCTIONAL TARGETS

Unit 1 Unit 2 Unit 3 Unit 4

First grade Conjunctions Passive Structure

Quantifying Adverbs

Elaborated Noun Phrases

Kindergarten Prepositional Phrases

Conjunctions Modal Verbs Adverbial Phrases

Prekindergarten Prepositional Phrases

Conjunctions Adverbial Phrases

Negative Structure

INSTRUCTIONAL CONTEXT

All grades include Motion-Science concepts as context of stories and activities

First Question: How do we make Syntax…..FUN???


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WEEKLY PLAN AND DAILY LESSONS

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4

Introduce T.O.M. Vocab.

Review T.O.M. Vocab.

Story Scene Interactive Activity

Preview Story

Interactive Story

Activities

Model- Receptive-Expressive Motion

Prop Activities

Model- Receptive-Expressive

Motion Prop Activities

Lightening Round

Wrap Up

Board/Picture Games with

Cumulative Review

Differentiated Instruction:-Between grades: increased expressive expectations-Within grade: built-in Up- and Down-Scaffolding

PRE-K INSTRUCTIONAL FEATURES

• Explicit instruction in small number of syntactical features per week, with extensive opportunities for practice in multiple contexts

• Model Receptive Expressive lesson format with explicit scaffolding

• Highly interactive with two-dimensional images and three-dimensional manipulation of movement props

PRE-KINDERGARTEN UNIT 1

Objective: By the end of the unit, students should be able to:• Indicate location of prepositions• Use primary target prepositions appropriately in a

sentence• Understand prepositions that are opposite in

meaning (i.e., above and below)• Correctly repeat back a sentence using a

primary target prepositionPrimary Targets:

Above, Below, Behind, Between


Objective: By the end of the unit, students should be able to:

• Follow directions that include conjunctions to indicate appropriate pictures

• Complete a sentence containing a primary target conjunction

• Use primary target conjunctions appropriately in a sentence

• Correctly repeat back a sentence using a primary target conjunction

Primary Targets:And, Or, But

In the beginning of the story, Jessica had a choice to make.

What were Jessica's two choices?


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Objective: By the end of the unit, students should be able to:• Answer questions about how the action in the

sentence was completed• Use adverbial phrases appropriately in a

sentence• Correctly repeat back a sentence using adverbial

phrases• Indicate pictures that are correctly depicting

various –ly adverbs

Primary Targets:• Quickly, Tightly, All, Only


Objective: By the end of the unit, students should be able to:• Indicate pictures that depict where a given action is not

happening• Complete a negative sentence• Correctly answer a question about what is not true or

incorrect in a sentence• Answer questions about what one should “never” do• Understand what actions are done always, never or

sometimes

Primary Targets: • Not, Don’t, Can’t, Isn’t, Won’t, Never, Un-

METHOD: OVERVIEW YEAR 1

• Small scale field design studies following a cycle:

• Design test revise test

• We did this independently for each of the 4 instructional units, so 8 total trials across the year with preschoolers

• 64 children participated. Each group of 16 children participated in two of the trials, but not the same unit twice

• 3 weeks of intervention, Pre- and post-test

DESIGN STUDY


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METHOD: YEAR 1 MEASUREMENT

• Screening: Listening Comprehension (OWLS), Syntax (CELF-P:2, CASL)

• Pre-Post Measurement• Listening Comprehension: stories with embedded

syntactical targets and mental state verbs

• Sentence Level Assessment: receptive and expressive items

• PPVT -III

EFFECT SIZES BY TRIAL

Syntax CBM Listening Comp. CBM

Unit 1 Trial 1 .21 .46 Unit 1 Trial 2 .02* .30 Unit 2 Trial 1 -.07 .40* Unit 2 Trial 2 .32 .30 Unit 3 Trial 1 .79* .25 Unit 3 Trial 2 1.40** .32 Unit 4 Trial 1 .86* .59* Unit 4 Trial 2 .30 .02

METHOD: OVERVIEW YEAR 2

• Instruction on syntactical targets and mental state verbs

• 82 Pre-K children

• Children screened-in on CELF, CASL subtests

• Pre-, mid-, and post-test

• Interventionists: Researcher trained, experienced teachers

METHOD: OVERVIEW

• Recruited from 11 schools in two cities in north Florida

• Children were screened on CELF Concepts & Following Directions and CASL Syntax Construction

• Qualifying Children scored at or below the 50th percentile on one or both measures


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METHOD: PRE-POST ASSESSMENTS

• CELF: Sentence Structure• OWLS: Listening Comprehension• WJ: Picture Vocabulary• Curriculum-Based Syntax Measures: receptive and

expressive items• Curriculum-Based Listening Comprehension:

constructed passages with embedded syntactical targets and mental state verbs (a “distimal” measure)

METHOD: PARTICIPANTS: PRE-K

• Screened 120 children from 5 schools, 10 classrooms, Title 1 public pre-k

• Qualifying Subgroup: 45% Female; 74.4% African American, 18.3% White, 7.3% other

• Qualifying Screening Scores: • Range from 2-11 for Scaled Scores on CELF-P2-CFD

and from 61-99 Standard Scores on the CASL-SC

• CELF-P2-CFD mean = 6.27, SD = 2.11• CASL-SC mean = 80.81, SD = 9.18

PRETEST BY CONDITION

Control TreatmentMean (SD) Standard

ScoreMean (SD) Standard

ScoreSyntax CBM 9.26 (2.81) --- 10.69 (3.80) ---

Listening Comp. CBM 1

0.76 (0.83) --- 1.26 (1.09) ---


0.51 (0.66) --- 0.63 (0.62) ---

CELF-P2 Sentence Structure

10.49 (3.51) 6.13 12.00 (3.98) 7.14

OWLS-LC 23.07 (8.11) 83.13 27.04 (10.89) 88.42

WJ- Picture Vocabulary

11.85 (2.49) 92.65 13.46 (2.56) 96.44

ADJUSTED POST-TESTS

Control Treatment p Effect Size

Adj. Mean (SD) Adj. Mean (SD)

Syntax CBM 11.57 (3.59) 15.26 (5.36) <.001 0.81


1.37 (1.12) 1.79 (1.22) >.10 0.36


1.07 (0.88) 1.67 (1.04) <.001 0.62

CELF-P2 Sentence Structure

13.34 (3.19) 14.33 (4.09) >.10 0.27

OWLS-LC 28.1 (9.82) 30.31 (10.25) >.10 0.22

WJ- Picture Vocabulary

14.92 (2.50) 13.97 (2.96) >.10 -0.19


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DISCUSSION

• Strong impacts on curriculum-linked syntax and listening comprehension

• Although not significant, moderate, meaningful effect sizes for standardized test of syntax and promising findings for listening comprehension

• Suggests need to increase intensity of dose?

• Very promising initial data for the intervention

phillips tier 2 intervention friday handoutversion · • child uses sentences with more than one...

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